IF you’ve been smitten with the dreadful sense that history now acts as some reverse time-machine, relentlessly dragging us back into the past, 100 years to the 1920s and 1930s, then your jitters aren’t misplaced, indeed they’re confirmed by the tastes of millions.
Across social media - Elon Musk’s X, to YouTube and those GenZ favourites TikTok and Instagram - fellow human beings, in numbers which would populate an average-sized nation, are consuming "content" glorifying Adolf Hitler.
I struggle to comprehend that I’ve just written that sentence. The Holocaust happened only a lifetime ago, yet tens of millions idolise its architect.
As a writer, I’ve always struggled with the word "evil"; it strips humanity from the target. But Hitler, both through his crimes and his assault on the very notion of what it means to be human, personifies evil. How then can other human beings idolise this man?
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Recently, Dani Dayan, chair of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial, condemned a podcast by the right-wing American media personality Tucker Carlson, once a star of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. The podcast featured Darryl Cooper, billed by Carlson as America’s “best and most honest popular historian”.
Cooper said the Holocaust was an accident, not an intentional act of genocide. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) - an international think-tank investigating polarisation, extremism and disinformation - reported that Cooper........